Minded Systems

Browser Rendering Of Cisco Services With XSLT

January 10th, 2011Tyler Winfield

When building custom Cisco XML Service applications, the action of testing the applications can easily turn into a tedious and agitating process. With the limited input facilities available on a Cisco IP Phone, data entry and debugging; among other tasks, becomes much more difficult. In addition to the problems of interacting with the service, there is also the problem of testing more than one object at a time. Although custom menus can be setup to access the various objects being tested, this results in the maintenance of additional service objects that are not necessary for the final application.

In light of these issues with testing and development, our programming group put together and added the functionality to apply XSLT stylesheets to XML service objects and return the formatted results of the transformation. With this functionality available, an XSLT stylesheet was created to provide an HTML rendering of Cisco XML objects to make them easily viewable in any web browser.

With XML service objects available in a browser-friendly format, testing can be done quickly and easily through workstations. No need to continually re-work Cisco phone configuration files and reset. Also, by transforming the XML objects into more usable markup; additional functionality has been added to help the objects perform similar to when loaded through a Cisco IP Phone. The most notable function of this nature is the basic masking of input fields with JQuery when rendered through the XSLT sytlesheet.

Further modifications and additions are expected to be made to the XSLT stylesheet as the framework grows. These additions and modifications will be made and the file re-uploaded in place. A copy of the most up to date XSLT stylesheet will be kep attached here as long as it is available.